Oldest schoolhouse for Black children in the country moved to Virginia museum

by The Associated Press

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (AP) — A building believed to be the oldest surviving schoolhouse for Black children in the U.S. was hoisted onto a flatbed truck and moved a half-mile Friday to Colonial Williamsburg, a Virginia museum that continues to expand its emphasis on African American history.

Built 25 years before the American Revolution, the original structure stood near the college campus of William & Mary. The pinewood building held as many as 30 students at a time, some of them free Black children studying alongside the enslaved…

For historians and descendants alike, the Bray School contradicts the belief that all enslaved Americans were uneducated. But the school’s faith-based curriculum — created by an English charity — also justified slavery and encouraged students to accept their fate as God’s plan…

It was a brand of duplicity that fit easily into the larger contradictions of the country’s founding, when the Democracy being forged explicitly denied rights and freedoms to many of its people…

Williamsburg is less than 10 miles from Jamestown, which England established in 1607. Enslaved Africans were supplied to the colony for labor just a dozen years later. A century and half after that, Black people, most of them still enslaved, represented just over half of Williamsburg’s 2,000 people.

The Bray School was established in 1760 at the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin, chairman of a London-based Anglican charity named after philanthropist Reverend Thomas Bray. The charity also set up schools in other cities, including New York and Philadelphia…

Enjoy the complete article here.

For more Breaking News click here.

For more ABHM galleries click here.